Deep-Six the Law of the Sea

Deep-Six The Law Of The Sea

by Phyllis Schlafly, May 23, 2007

Borrowing the famous words of General Douglas MacArthur that "old soldiers never die, they just fade away," we can now see that old treaties never die, they can be resurrected years or even decades after taking what we thought was a knockout punch.

President George W. Bush is scheduled to announce any day that he will breathe new life into the old United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which President Ronald Reagan rejected in 1982. Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has asked Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-DE) to secure Senate ratification "as early as possible."

To defuse expected opposition, the Bush Administration has been pursuing a most unusual lobbying campaign: inviting two or three prominent conservatives at a time to the White House without telling them in advance the purpose of the invitation or who will be present. After admission past executive office barricades, the conservatives are subjected to aggressive lobbying by Administration heavy hitters: usually the chief counsel for the State Department and the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy.

The 202-page Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) entered into force in 1994 and has been ratified by 153 countries. The LOST created the International Seabed Authority (ISA), giving it total jurisdiction over all the oceans and everything in them, including the ocean floor with "all" its riches ("solid, liquid or gaseous mineral resources"), along with the power to regulate seven/tenths of the world's surface.

Headquartered in Jamaica, the ISA has an Assembly, a Council, a bureaucracy and commissions, all drawing tax-free salaries. If the United States ratifies the treaty, we would have the same vote in the ISA as Cuba, an unprecedented surrender of American sovereignty, independence of action, and wealth.

Even worse, the LOST gives the ISA the power to levy international taxes. We are not fooled by the LOST's attempt to conceal this by labeling the taxes assessments, fees, permits, payments, or contributions.

The real purpose of the taxing power is to compel the United States to pay billions of private-enterprise dollars to the ISA bureaucrats, who can then transfer our wealth to socialist, anti-American nations (euphemistically called "developing countries") ruled by corrupt dictators. The LOST piously asserts that this is for "the benefit of mankind as a whole."

The LOST gives the ISA the power to regulate "all" ocean research and exploration and to deny access to strategic ocean minerals, many of which we need for our national defense or industries. The LOST gives the ISA the power to impose production quotas for deep-sea mining and oil production.

The ISA can require us to share our intelligence, technology, and even military information. The Treaty puts restrictions on our intelligence-gathering by our submarines, activities that are essential to our national defense.

The LOST also created the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with the power of a super supreme court to decide all disputes and enforce its judgments. Of course, there is no guarantee that the United States would have even one judge on this 21-member international court, and it's reasonable to assume inherent bias against the United States by the anti-American countries whose representatives will make all decisions.

There can be no appeal from this Tribunal's decisions, even though they would affect our sovereignty, national security and economic interests. There is no restriction on the Tribunal's jurisdiction.

Administration lobbyists claim that the original problems with the LOST have been fixed. That is not believable because the text of the treaty can't be changed unilaterally.

Bush apparently expects conservatives to be mollified by the argument that the Navy supports LOST. But conservatives are smart enough to know that it's impossible for the Navy to oppose the Commander in Chief's position.

The notion that our great U.S. Navy needs approval from foreign bureaucrats in Jamaica in order to enjoy passage through international straits, or for permission to do what our Navy is already doing (such as moving our ships to the waters near Iran), is offensive and insulting to U.S. sovereignty.

It's not only dangerous to our national security for the Administration to promote the Law of the Sea Treaty, it is a stupid political move that will diminish the shrinking percentage of conservatives who still support Bush. Now a lame duck, Bush is ignoring his supporters and instead pushing the agenda of the globalists who are determined to erase our sovereign borders and integrate us into various multinational structures and tribunals.